The Bonanza King

by Gregory Crouch

  Sharon met Ralston at the height of the troubles. As Sharon told an associate four years later, he found Ralston “spreading out in his big way.” A review of private records revealed that Ralston owed the Bank of California $3 million, a colossal sum. Ralston didn’t have that kind of money. William Sharon, however, did have, as he told it, “a little matter of $4 million” socked away, and he hadn’t forgotten that Ralston’s aid had seen him through rough times in 1864. Sharon fronted enough money to Ralston to spare Ralston the embarrassment of making an “accounting of how much he had overdrawn.” Sharon said it gave him “great pleasure” to return the favor and “get even” with Ralston, an odd manner of phrasing aid to his closest business associate.

  The rescue may have soaked up the reserves with which Sharon could have defended the Crown Point. History doesn’t record at what point Sharon learned that his long-time associates had turned their coats. He might not have learned until it was too late for him to stave off the raid. Whatever the case, Sharon did manage to possess himself of 4,100 of the Crown Point’s 12,000 shares without provoking the sort of pitched public battle that had haunted his capture of the Hale & Norcross in 1868. That wasn’t enough—Jones and Hayward had already swept up more than half of the mine’s 12,000 shares. The Crown Point slipped from Sharon’s clutches.

  On March 1, 1871, the value of Crown Point shares jumped, taking the price to $55 and pushing the mine’s per-foot value over $1,000—where it had been in 1866. From there, nothing slowed the Crown Point’s ascent. Twenty days later, shares reached $160. In May, they passed $300—a staggering 120-fold increase in the seven months since its November low.

  Even though he’d lost the Crown Point, William Sharon played another card. He judged it probable the new ore body would stretch south into Belcher ground. He decided to gamble on that mine rather than contest the Crown Point. So while the Crown Point held the eyes of the mining world, Sharon acquired large quantities of Belcher stock—quietly—and just as Mackay, Flood, Fair, and O’Brien had done when they spirited the Hale & Norcross out from under his nose, Sharon pulled off his Belcher coup with a perfect poker face. By the time people noticed, Sharon owned nearly the entire mine.

  The Belcher gamble was a stroke of genius, one that would give a new lease on life to the Bank of California—and to William Ralston.

  As for John Mackay and his partners, they missed the Crown Point and Belcher opportunities entirely. The wonderful bonanza developed in those two mines pushed them into a very distant third place. The Irishmen hoped to remain significant players in the battles to control the Comstock Lode. To push themselves back to the forefront, they’d have to make up a lot of lost ground.

  * * *

  I. Although it’s not the same building, champagne breakfast at the Cliff House is a San Francisco experience that could still be enjoyed in 2018.

  II. As a share of the total national economy, $100 million in 1870 was equal to about $250 billion in 2018.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Consolidated Virginia Mine

  A mule team hauls an enormous load of ore to a mine’s weigh station.

  * * *

  The ore deposits in the great Comstock Lode are distributed somewhat as are the plums in a Christmas pudding, the vein matter is the dough and the bunches of ore are the plums. As long as you keep gouging about in the dough, you are liable to come upon a plum, or a cucumber, or if you are in big luck, a great pumpkin.

  —“Consolidated Virginia,” Territorial Enterprise, August 31, 1871

  Genuine warmth had sprung up between John Mackay and his daughter Eva in the four years they’d known each other. Mackay always treated Eva as one of his own, but now that he had a son in the household who occupied so much of his and her mother’s attention, Mackay worried Eva would feel as if she’d lost her place in his heart and become unimportant. Thinking it might provide her a measure of permanent emotional security, John Mackay formally adopted her on Christmas Day, 1870, and gave her his name. She became Eva Bryant Mackay. John and Louise never tried to erase her connection to her father—they kept a likeness of Dr. Bryant in her room—but in reality John Mackay had become a much more stable and loving parental presence in her life than the late doctor ever managed to be.

  The family had returned to Virginia City after Louise recovered from delivering Willie. The clanging of fire alarms jarred them from bed on the last night of January 1871. John Mackay stood outside to assess the danger. Wild, raging winds drove leaping flames through portions of D and E streets at a safe distance from their home. For a time, it looked as though the whole eastern portion of the city would be lost. Only the reckless courage of the firefighters prevented catastrophe. Firemen manned hoses on rooftops in billowing clouds of smoke, silhouetted against the flames leaping into the darkness. They sprayed down adjacent buildings while orange tongues licked up through the shingles around them. Gawkers yelled at them to save themselves, and at the last minute, they did. Before it was subdued, the blaze swept away twenty-two houses, burned two men to death, and destroyed $75,000 worth of property, much of it uninsured since it occurred in a portion of the town in which insurance agents preferred not to take risks—at least ones of the financial variety. The Territorial Enterprise explained: “When we say that most of the houses were occupied by women of the town, we will be understood.”

  A winter blessedly free from smallpox enhanced the popularity of social gatherings, and two days after the fire, three businessmen whose establishments had been saved by the valiant efforts of Knickerbocker Engine Company Number 5 sponsored a “grand blowout” at the enginehouse—a fine lunch and “all the wine, lager beer and other liquors that could be disposed of.” While the firemen did themselves proud for a second time in forty-eight hours, sustaining an attack upon the beverage refreshments “of some four hours duration,” a new passion for roller-skating was diverting interest from Virginia City’s traditional winter pastimes of sleighing and “coasting.” (The velocipede craze had faded.) A company erected roller-skating rinks at the Miners’ Union and Armory halls on B Street. Washoeites took to the new sport quickly, gliding on steel wheels with great daring. Men, women, and children thronged the rinks day and night and, in the words of the Territorial Enterprise, soon learned to “perform feats that excite both the admiration and terror of the new beginners.”

  San Francisco Chronicle correspondent Mary Jane Simpson called Virginia City “skating mad,” and the Territorial Enterprise felt secure identifying roller skating as “the most popular sport that has ever been introduced in this place.” The number of men ambling about town with splinted wrists and arm slings also caught the newspaper’s eye. “Skating is an amusement with which the surgeons are not likely to find fault,” it noted.

  If nine-year-old Eva was one of the many Comstock children experimenting with the new sport, it must have been hard for John and Louise Mackay to watch her lame hip hamper her progress. Mackay had engaged the best medical men in Virginia City and San Francisco to examine it. None offered any solution. Mackay and his wife weren’t prepared to abandon hope until they’d consulted the best European doctors, however. They’d heard of a surgeon in Paris who might be able to help. To that end, thirty-nine-year-old John Mackay did something in the spring of 1871 that he might never have done before in his life—he took a vacation.

  Professionally, it came at a good time. He and James Fair had opened an eighth station in the Hale & Norcross’s Fair Shaft 1,251 feet below the surface, deeper than any other mine in Nevada.

  The confidence Mackay had in his partners allowed him to step away from the Comstock for a season. Taking Willie’s nurse, Alice O’Grady, along with them, the Mackays traversed the continent to New York City on the new railroad, through vast swaths of America none of them had ever seen. The city had changed tremendously in the twenty years since either John or Louise Mackay had seen it. Many touchstones of their youth had vanished into the city’s unstoppable growth, and new landmarks had sprung up th
at they’d never seen before, paramount among them huge Central Park, begun in 1858 and at last nearing completion. The city’s population had nearly doubled, from just over 515,000 in 1850 to just under 950,000 in 1870, a large percentage of whom lived crammed into seething immigrant tenements not much changed from the ones Mackay had endured in his youth. Newer tenements were built of brick rather than wood, but they were just as crowded and unhealthy. New York’s economic muscle had grown to dominate the nation’s financial and capital markets, and with three railways converging on the city in addition to the old water route through the Erie Canal to the Great Lakes, port volumes had exploded. The biggest undertaking in New York in 1871 was the construction of an enormous suspension bridge over the East River to connect Brooklyn and New York. No bridge on its scale had ever been built, anywhere in the world, and aside from the engineering particulars, which John Mackay surely found fascinating, plans for bridge construction called for the southern edge of the East River Bridge’s New York City approach to be built right through the site of the rickety tenement in which he’d grown up. John, Louise, Eva, and eight-month-old Willie departed New York for Liverpool aboard the steamship City of Brooklyn on April 8, 1871.

  The family tarried in London. On the other side of the English Channel, France struggled to recover from the stunning defeat it had received in the recently concluded Franco-Prussian War. A conservative provisional government formed from the wreckage of France. Parisian socialists and anarchists had revolted against it in late March, formed a revolutionary government—the Paris Commune—and fortified the city. The Commune gripped Paris through April and May, and with violence seeming both imminent and inevitable, Paris seemed too dangerous to visit.

  Fortunately, London was its own reward. With more than 3 million inhabitants, London dwarfed New York, the capital of an empire at its apogee sprouting modern and spectacular public spaces and architecture—Trafalgar Square; the new Houses of Parliament at Westminster; Big Ben, just twelve years old; and the Royal Albert Hall, which hosted its first concert a few weeks before the Mackays arrived. Careful tourists never saw the poverty and squalor in the East End’s immigrant and working-class neighborhoods.

  The Paris violence climaxed while the Mackays enjoyed London. The French regular army attacked the Commune. Thousands died in a week of bitter street fighting and summary executions that followed. Mackay took his family to Paris after the fighting subsided. The city showed the scars of the recent violence, and the surgeon they’d come so far to see wasn’t to be found. He’d probably fled the city, along with many other middle- and upper-class Parisians. Instead, the Mackays enjoyed what they could of Paris, then made a grand tour of Southern France and the lakes of Northern Italy.

  Sometime during their European travels in 1871, John Mackay broke away from his family and returned to Ireland, compelled to learn if there was anybody from the old days to whom he could repay a former kindness from his store of current good fortune. He hadn’t seen the country in more than thirty years. The sadness of Ireland caught him unprepared. Everyone he’d known had either emigrated or vanished into the havoc of the famine and the ruinous poverty that continued to haunt the island. Only the timeless green of the Irish countryside connected him to what had once been home. He rejoined his family shaken.

  In September, John and Louise finally consulted the surgeon about Eva’s hip. The doctor thought he knew an operation that could help the child, but didn’t want her recovering from surgery through the gloomy Parisian fall and winter. He suggested Eva spend the winter gathering strength in Mediterranean sunshine and have the operation in the coming spring. Mackay decided that his family should stay in France while he returned to the Comstock. He’d come back to Paris the following June and see Eva through the operation.

  Mackay was becoming a worldly man. He must have felt infused with confidence by his mining success and the expanding breadth of his experience. He and Louise brushed against noble European “society,” but as Mackay surely saw, in his life he’d done more than all but the most exceptional European aristocrats. Much more. And as was equally apparent, he could do more, and that was how a man was measured on the mining frontier. Impeccably dressed in suits made by the finest Savile Row tailors, Mackay had fulfilled some of his life’s ambitions in Europe—he’d attended some of the best symphonies, operas, and theaters with his wife, enjoying the finest seats. Together they’d seen some of the world’s great art. The cultural experiences moved Mackay tremendously and whetted his appetite for more. He’d come a long way from the rag-patched newsboy jostling for a view in the galleries of the Bowery Theater.

  On October 4, 1871, the Territorial Enterprise noted John Mackay’s return to Virginia City after “a ramble of some months’ duration through the Atlantic States and Europe.” The newspaper thought it looked “as if the cuisine everywhere agreed with him.”

  Much had happened on the Comstock during Mackay’s seven-month absence. The Crown Point strike had evolved from what the Mining & Scientific Press described in April as the best body of ore ever discovered “in that section of the Comstock” into an “absolutely immense” bonanza that dwarfed anything else ever dug out of the lode. Mining sharps regarded the discovery with “a degree of astonishment . . . not far removed from awe.”

  There had been other excitements during Mackay’s absence, not all of them so positive. Virginia City had sprouted a Vigilance Committee, “No. 601” or “the 601” as they styled themselves, and they’d hung two men to death, one of whom deserved it without question—Arthur Perkins, a piano player and “sport” who’d shot an unarmed miner in cold blood from point-blank range in front of many witnesses. The bullet went into the victim’s eye and blew blood and brains out the back of his head and all over the cigar stand at the entrance of the International Saloon. An “epidemic of crime appears to be raging, which only copious doses of hemp, liberally applied, will check!” thundered a Chronicle editor from the safety of his desk in San Francisco. “Virginia wants weeding out,” added Mary Jane Simpson.

  Weeding began that same night. At 1:00 a.m., seventy masked and armed vigilantes forced their way into the Storey County Jail, held the guards at gunpoint, and rousted Perkins. They marched him to the old Armory Hall, tried and convicted him, and hung him from a beam in an abandoned building in the old Mexican works, all within an hour. A card pinned on his body read, “Arthur Perkins, Hung by Vigilance Committee No. 601.”

  In the aftermath of the hanging, a number of suspicious characters received “601” notices inviting them to leave town, among them George Kirk. A Sunday school teacher George Kirk most definitely was not. He’d served time in the California penitentiary for an attempted murder in 1858, served time for burglary in Nevada, and although he’d worked in the Imperial mine after his release, the 601 judged him a “rowdy” too friendly with the man whose neck they’d recently stretched. They told him to leave town.

  Kirk heeded the warning and went to Austin, but he didn’t stick. He returned to Virginia City. He scurried to Carson City after receiving a second 601 missive suggesting he leave town. Kirk had a fondness for liquor, and word of the drunken threats he leveled against the Vigilance Committee filtered back to Virginia City. Kirk also nursed an affection for “Dutch Mary,” who kept a bawdy house opposite City Hall on North C Street. He’d been bold enough to return to see her on at least one other occasion.

  One night in mid-July, news went through Virginia City that Kirk had returned yet again. Two men lured him from Dutch Mary’s house about an hour before midnight. A few dozen steps down the street, forty or fifty men converged on Kirk from the shadows and marched him away. Later that night, a group of lawmen searching with lanterns found Kirk’s body dangling from the trestle work of the elevated car track of the Sierra Nevada mine beyond the northern outskirts of town. A handkerchief covered his eyes. Cords bound his hands and feet. A note pinned to his chest read, “George B. Kirk, 601 Committee.”

  Dutch Mary’s real name was
Mary Smith, or at least that was the name she used at legal proceedings. According to the testimony she gave the coroner’s jury, George Kirk had dropped by to make her a gift of a dog he’d brought up from Carson City.

  • • •

  Upon Mackay’s return, it couldn’t have taken long for someone to rush up and tell him about the Comstock’s latest scandal—the Belcher had been caught watering its stock. Eight more feet had been found in the mine than showed when measured by surface surveys.

  Mackay might have looked puzzled, but it was true. There were eight new feet in the Belcher. They belonged to the pair of mules Superintendent Hank Smith had sent down to the 1,100-foot level to solve a nagging problem. John Mackay’s reaction went unrecorded, but the Territorial Enterprise reported many persons “bit” on the joke.

  While Belcher miners waited for their incline to reach the level of the ore body, all the ore they extracted from the Belcher’s share of the bonanza on the 1,100-foot level had to go up the Yellow Jacket’s South Shaft. One of the biggest obstacles they faced was the 100-foot difference in elevation between the track floor in the ore body at 1,100 feet and the South Shaft’s 1,000-foot station. The incline gained the full elevation over the course of 500 linear feet. Pushing a 1,200-pound carload of ore up the incline required the strength of several men, and even then, most men could manage to do it only a few times in the course of a ten-hour shift. No man could sustain the labor for anything close to the entire time. Superintendent Smith decided the job called for a pair of stout American mules, one to work with each shift of miners. To that end, Smith bought a mule called “Old Pete” and his female companion.